Six Figure Expansion

Welcome to Six Figure Expansion!

This post is for people who have plateaued at an amount that is at or below six figures a year. 

So, if:

• You are a heart-centered entrepreneur who has hit an income plateau that’s below $8,000 months, and you know for sure that you want more
• It feels like you’ve been investing a lot of time and energy into your business and there’s a missing link
• You want to dramatically change the course of your business by having a clear roadmap to success that doesn’t just revolve around a cookie cutter template

Then this is for you.

This post will outline how to:

• Clarify your messaging in terms of who you want to be talking to
• Hit your goals with less overwhelm and a lot more fun and trust in the process
• Overcome imposter syndrome and become an authority in your industry so your ideal clients are magnetized to you
• Create a solid game plan for your own six-figure year that feels aligned and holistic with your life goals.

Other people who might appreciate this post are people who are well over six figures, but it’s really hard and it’s not fun anymore.

In a lot of 2021, I was just really down and struggling. I still did multiple six figures in 2020 and again in 2021, but in 2021, it was hard as hell and it was painful, and also my expenses were so high that my life really suffered.

A lot of what I’ve been teaching in 2022 is how I got out of that at the end of 2021. The more I integrate and the more fun and easy and light things get to feel for me, the more I want to pass that along to you.

How do we make business and life fun again?

I’m sure that I’ll have another multiple six-figure year, and I’m hoping that my income increases this year over last year. But – if I make the same amount this year and have more fun, that would be one of many wins that I’ve experienced. I’m definitely having a lot more fun this year.

Clarifying Your Messaging to Make Six Figures

The first thing I want you to think about when clarifying your messaging is not the other person, not your audience, not the buyer, but you.

Your offer’s coming from whatever’s inside of you.

Your purpose and the way that your life unfolds is going to be unique compared to anybody else in the universe. When you’re starting to think about to make money in a more aligned and fun way, always keep your own personal journey in mind.

I’ll talk about market research in the next step as far as figuring out your messaging, but at first I want you to know your own transformation story, and it’s possible that your own transformation story doesn’t totally relate to what you’re selling, and that’s okay.

Understanding the phases that are in your transformation story, even if it’s not relevant to what your client is going through right now, is still going to help you understand the transformation that your client is going to go through in your process. Even if you’re selling a $12 printable, knowing how this $12 printable is going to change someone will be more powerful than you just saying, “This is a great offer because it’s only $12 and it’s a printable.”

The Transformation Story

You have to understand transformation story, and that starts with you. Changing the world always starts with changing yourself.

And so, there’s four phases in your transformation story, and you’ll have many transformation stories over the period of your life. I have had many transformations over the course of my life already.

The four phases of a transformation story are:

1. The backstory
2. The wall
3. The pivot
4. The triumph

This whole framework is adapted from Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson, the creator of ClickFunnels. His book is still a really great relevant book. Even though I think the webinars have changed a lot since the book came out, his framework in this book is really good. So, this transformation story framework is adapted from that.

Backstory

So, let’s talk about the backstory – understanding your own backstory before even thinking about the client.

For example, I’ve been a business coach. I’ve had several transformations.

When I first did this exercise, my transformation was in the marketing world, wanting to become a leader in real estate marketing, and now it’s so different. My transformation now, in this moment, are that I’ve been a business coach and marketing coach since 2017; the niches that I was in then were because I was told you need to narrow down and serve where the money’s coming from.

And so, my first niche was in real estate. It was not that easy for me to sell, because I wasn’t a real estate agent. I went through the process toward getting my license and decided I just didn’t want to practice real estate. I never got my license, never took the final exam. It didn’t feel that meaningful to me.

But that was part of my backstory – I kept ending up in coaching programs where there was this urgency to put myself in a box.

I kept putting myself in a box, and I kept wanting to not be in that box.

I also kept joining coaching programs where there was a lot of pressure to reach big goals, a lot of pressure to increase pricing to a certain point.

These masterminds were increasingly more expensive. I ended up being in a place where I didn’t even know who I was or what I wanted anymore.

So, that’s the backstory. I ended up in a bunch of masterminds where I was just told over and over again, in a very urgent way, what to do specifically. What ended up happening was I hit a wall.

The Wall

I hit a wall where I was sad, where I wasn’t enjoying my work anymore. My programs weren’t selling. I even did a big, giant launch where I had an agency to do a bunch of ads and run a launch, and didn’t get any sales for the program I was launching. So, that was kind of a bottom for me.

So, you have the backstory, and then you have the wall, and then you have the pivot.

The Pivot

The pivot was that I realized that even though I made some progress in regulating my nervous system, there was still a missing piece.

I ended up hiring a medium as a life coach, who taught me more how to embody a feminine energy. I’d always heard about feminine energy, but I didn’t really know what that meant or how to receive. The triumph was that I learned not just how to receive and how to be more grateful in the moment for what I have, but because of the masculine that I embody so easily, I was able to create a systematic process to learn how to receive, and teach that to my clients.

I’d like to invite you to go share your transformation story in the Mindful Marketing Mavens group. So, you have the backstory, and then you have the place where you hit a wall, and then you have a place where you made a change, and then you’re finally winning again.

Understanding your own transformation stories over and over again will help you to put yourself in your client’s shoes. Now, this has to be combined with clarifying your own unique messaging. This has to be combined with market research – but the first step to understanding your purpose, and then how that ties into your client is knowing your own transformation.

Market Research for Six Figures

Next, you want to combine the transformation story with market research.

With market research, I have questions that I give to my paying clients. I’m not going to give you those exact questions right now, but I will tell you that when you’re doing market research, you’re looking for six things.

If you Google “market research questions for coaches,” “market research questions for course creators,” “market research questions for bloggers,” you’ll probably find a similar vibe of lists.

Here’s the six things you need to know in your six figure market research:

1. The struggle the person is having
2. How it’s affecting them
3. What their actual desire is
4. Why that’s important to them
5. How that would affect them
6. Are they willing to invest, not in you, but in general, and is this a priority for them?

So, one example of why you need to know if they’re willing to invest, and know whether it’s a priority for them, is because that can change over time. Sometimes they might really want something, but it may not be a priority for them.

For example, this year, a family who previously used to travel a whole lot is probably really wanting to travel right now. So, that might be a priority for them, because they’re able to travel for the first time in a long time. But in 2020, at the height of the C word, it might not have been a priority for them. In your market research, then, what is their willingness to invest in travel?

So, you have to know their willingness to invest.

Your transformation story will start revealing to you kind of the emotions and the energy that you want to speak to. Then, your market research will help you understand what people want to buy. And THEN you can just create what people want to buy.

How to hit your six figure goals with less overwhelm

There’s a few things I want to address in this:

1. Creating safety
2. Addressing your energy
3. Your own personality

So, let’s first talk about creating safety.

There’s two components to creating safety: creating safety from a practical standpoint, and creating safety from an emotional or mental perspective.

When I think about being safe, I think about this mastermind I was once in.

After I joined the mastermind, they increased the income requirement for it to well above what I was making. It makes sense, because the cost of this mastermind was probably outside of what I should have been investing in for what my income was.

The investment was so high that I had a feeling of being unsafe, and that can happen with really any investment, but you have to look at:

“Why am I feeling unsafe? Am I unsupported? Getting triggered? Is it because I’m making more money than I ever have? Because I’m doing things that are uncomfortable?”

That’s all mental and emotional safety issues.

And then there’s a practical safety issue, which is more like, “I can’t pay the mortgage.”

And so, when thinking about how to hit your goals with less energetic overwhelm, you have to make sure that you feel safe. People ask me all the time, “How do I know when it’s the right time to quit my job?” That has to do with practical safety. It also has to do with your own personality and your own energy.

I had a coach in 2019 who hated her job so much that she quit it cold turkey without a backup plan, and she became a coach, and that was basically jumping off a cliff, not a very safe situation, although she didn’t have kids or a mortgage. She did have a high rent because she lived in New York, but there wasn’t a house and kids at risk.

But she just jumped off the ledge without a backup plan, and that was enough pressure – because it is sometimes important to have pressure to take action. That’s why sometimes when you don’t have a coach or when you don’t have any pressure, you can kind of waffle a little bit. That was enough pressure for her, but that would’ve been too much pressure for me.

What worked for me for quitting my job was making sure that I knew the mortgage was going to get paid.

So, I had a full-time job, and then was able to go part-time with that job, and then was able to quit and knew that I was going to be able to pay the mortgage.

Now, there’s other ways of doing this besides just going part-time at your job. I was in a lucky situation where my full-time job let me go part-time, and by let me, I mean, they were a sinking ship and they really needed me and I really wanted to quit, and I was able to say, “I can stay, but only part-time.” So, it just really worked out for me. It was very toxic company, toxic culture, but I was glad I was able to serve them. So, that’s what felt safe to me, but not everybody can have that situation.

Other ways that people go about creating this practical safety while they’re growing their businesses is to do some service based business.

I have seen a lot of full-time bloggers that have a side hustle that was paying for most of their bills That’s very normal. That’s a great idea if you want to go full-time blogging, because in blogging, for most niches, you’re going to have a volume-based business that grows over time. It’s going to take a long time to get a full-time income with a low-cost offer, with an offer under $100.

But some of you, that’s exactly what you were called to do is to create a bunch of low-cost offers and a ton of traffic. So, knowing that, knowing that’s your real calling, you might have a short-term compromise to do some service-based work that can bring in multiple four figures a little bit easier. That’s a great way to create practical safety.

We also need to talk about creating safety mentally and emotionally.

This is the kind of work that we would do once people join a program with me.

In Worthy of Wealth, we want to make sure that you are generously full-time as soon as possible. And so, in that program, we’re first addressing the practical safety.

Once we address the practical safety, then we have to start addressing the mental and emotional safety. We do this by regulating the nervous system – by practicing receiving.

I have a client who was saying she has a client right now that’s making her have some anxiety and doubt herself and question herself.

When she was talking about why that was happening, she said, “I think the reason why I feel this way is because the sale felt too easy. I’ve never had an easy sale, and I have a belief that I have to work really hard for everything I get.”

She felt like the rug might get pulled out from under her.

And so, this is where we get to practice mental and emotional safety. We get to say, “What would it feel like if every client felt this easy? What would it feel like if this was your avatar and it always got to feel this easy?”

Just practicing that, and also practicing what that feels like when it gets to be easy and holding space for the discomfort – because creating safety doesn’t come from pushing the bad feelings away. It comes from being with the bad feeling and also putting attention on how good it can feel, and learning to hold that duality.

Energy Drains

The other thing I want to address here when talking about avoiding overwhelm are energetic drains, setting boundaries, and energetic fillers.

Be aware of what things are soul-sucking to you, and it could be something big, like getting interrupted a lot during your day, or not sleeping enough, and it could be something small, like a lot of background noise that happens in your house all day. Just start becoming aware of those energy drains.

The way to combat energy drains are twofold.

One is you can try to prevent the energy drain, but sometimes you won’t be able to. I’ve got pets, and I love having my dog in my office, but when he barks, I hate it, and there’s not a lot I can do about it.

If I can’t stop the thing that’s draining me, then I can do something to fill myself up at the end of the day.

So, knowing that I’m auditory sensitive, I could put some headphones in and listen to some beautiful music or a beautiful sound or do a meditation. And so, knowing that I can’t always stop the thing that’s sucking my energy, I just could choose to put something back in from what drained me.

Personality

The last thing on how to meet your goals with a less energetic overwhelm is your personality, which includes three components:

• what you sell
• how you sell it
• how you make decisions.

What You Sell

You want to know what you’re selling. You want to make sure that you’re selling something that’s within your personality. Right?

For me, I haven’t had a lot of luck selling really low-cost things.

Coaching, staying boutique and having higher cost offers with fewer sales, that feels more fun to me. Even though I love the idea of passive income, I like the idea of leveraged income even more.

Those are things that I know are aligned with my personality currently. That could change.

For you, it could be “I’ve got six kids and I’ve got depression on and off, and I can’t be a business coach if I don’t want to talk to someone for two months at a time.” That doesn’t work.

I’ve had clients who were very clear that they didn’t want to be in a situation where they had to talk to people consistently, and so, any kind of coaching or consulting offer is off the table. If you can’t talk to someone, you can’t consult. What was on the table was high-cost courses, or maybe doing services, because you can do a high-cost service-based offer without talking to people a whole lot.

So, just knowing your personality is really important for what you sell.

How You Sell It

And then, how you sell it is the next important component, and I have another quiz for this.

How you Make Decisions

And then last thing is how you make decisions.

There’s lots of ways you can get insight into how you make decisions, but the easiest way for me to give you a free resource really quickly is look up your Human Design.

So, I know that a lot of people love the Enneagram, but every time I take the Enneagram quiz, I get a different result. So, I no longer trust it or myself when it comes to Enneagram. But Human Design is great because you can just plug in some numbers and it won’t change. You don’t have to take a quiz. You can just get the data. In Human Design, you can get some information into how you make decisions.

And so, having a business that feels easy for you truly depends on those three things in your personality.

How to Overcome Imposter Syndrome

So, number three is how to overcome imposter syndrome.

1. Create context.

The first thing is something that I just learned recently from Melanie Ann Layer. She talks about this idea of creating context in addition to goals.

So, if I say that I want to have 100k months, and then I don’t hit a 100k month, and I don’t hit a 100k month, and I don’t hit a 100k month, then I’m constantly poo-pooing on myself for not hitting that 100k month.

But if I say that I want to create the most actionable coaching programs for people to actually make money from their expertise, that’s a much bigger context than saying, “I just want to make 100k months.”

So, then I can still create the income goals, but what I’m really doing is focused always on that greater context.

I have even expanded it since then. My new context is that I want to help heal the world by making sure that good-hearted people are making more and more money. I believe that if heart-centered people are making more money, then the world becomes a better place, and then that expands even more.

So, that informs all the things that I’m doing.

I have a bigger context where I want to help good-hearted people make more money. Then that’s when I get into the nervous system work that I’m doing, and making business fun again – stuff that I’m doing because I want to help those good-hearted people make sure they keep going.

So, create goals, have the monthly goals, but make sure you’re always coming back to that bigger context.

When that bigger context exists, your competitors don’t matter anymore, and that’s why this relates to overcoming imposter syndrome.  It doesn’t matter to me what competitors are doing if I’m trying to help heal the world.

What I want to fight against is what I was a part of, and now what I’ve gotten out of. There’s a lot of trauma that happens in the coaching industry. A lot of coaches aren’t trauma-informed. There’s a lot of coaches who have success in something and they just start teaching it. They don’t really know good coaching tactics.

If you have a coach that can help you tune into yourself, then you don’t have to feel overwhelmed.

2. Limiting Beliefs

Another thing that will help you to overcome imposter syndrome is addressing limiting beliefs.

There’s lots of types of limiting beliefs; two that are relevant here are limiting beliefs about money, and limiting beliefs about yourself.

If you’re a journaler, the first two things you can journal about are what limiting beliefs do I have about money and what limiting beliefs do I have about myself.

Then, you can use a framework for working through these limiting beliefs:

1. Write out the limiting belief
2. Thank the limiting belief for being there
3. Forgive yourself for having that belief
4. Forgive the person who passed that belief onto you
5. Disprove it.

One limiting belief about money that is really common is:

“I have to work really hard, I have to work harder, harder to make more money.”

So, write that down., and thank that belief for being there. “Thank you so much for being there. It’s served me. It helped me get where I am, helped me learn to work really hard. And now I’ve also want to forgive that person or forgive myself for this isn’t serving me anymore. It doesn’t mean I did anything wrong. It just means that this isn’t working for me anymore.”

And then, you want to disprove it.

There’s plenty of times in my personal life where I wasn’t working that hard, and I still made a lot of money. Also, I interviewed someone on a podcast recently who has several seven-figure businesses. I asked her on the podcast, “How many hours a week do you work? Just curious.” And she said she works 20 hours or less a week to have multiple seven-figure businesses.

So, there’s some proof.

If you can’t disprove the limiting belief fully, you can create what’s called a bridge statement. A bridge statement is like a kick in my energy behind the complete opposite of this. So, I’m going to have a transition. Well, I’m learning to work less in order to make the same amount maybe.

The Customer Journey

The fourth piece of Six Figure Expansion is where we’re tying everything together to create a solid game plan for your own six-figure year.

This is where we combine all these elements, and then implement them into what’s called the customer journey. This customer journey is adapted from Ryan Deiss. He started digitalmarketer.com, and he has a very popular, large event called the Traffic & Conversion Summit in San Diego.

I adapted this framework from him.

To create your game plan for your six-figure year, you want to have in mind:

• your own transformation
• your market research
• making sure you’ve established safety, both from a practical perspective and a mental perspective

I want to speak to safety one more time; just because you’re making sure that you are safe from a practical perspective doesn’t mean that every investment you make is going to be easy for you. It is still important for you to do things that feel challenging.

When you’re investing in a coach that has business coaching elements like I do, you’re investing because you want to make more and grow more. Sometimes, you’re going to be investing in a level that feels stretchy but comfortable. Other times, you’re going to be investing in a level that feels really, really uncomfortable.

And this is also why it’s important for you to know how you make decisions. You have to be able, when you’re making decisions, to distinguish between a hell no and a hell yes. But there’s another option which is a this is really uncomfortable, but I think I need to do it. You have to know what those three things feel like.

So, we’re combining transformation, market research, safety, personality, and your context, your bigger life purpose, not just your monthly goals, and now we’re going to use the customer journey to create your custom roadmap.

Your six figure  customer journey involves six stages:

1. awareness – the first time they find out about you
2. consideration – how you capture their attention
3. conversion – how you get their contact information for the first time
4. sales – how you make money for the first time
5. excitement – your delivery and making them excited and getting results
6. referral – process for making sure it’s easy for clients to refer people to you

So, the awareness stage for my business, right now, is Instagram, my Facebook group, and then other organic opportunities. I’ve done a summit this year that got some people in my group. I was in a couple of bundles from Ultimate Bundles, which some of you guys found me through. And then I was in a free bundle with Faith Mariah. So, those are a few ways I’ve grown my audience this year; that’s how I’ve creating awareness. At this stage, you’re just getting to know who I am for the first time.

Then we have the consideration stage. So, in this particular funnel I’m describing, the consideration comes from the content that is delivered. On Instagram, it’s the caption. Now we’re getting eyeballs and we’re getting attention from people. In all these bundles and summits, it’s the content.

And then you have the conversion stage, which is getting them on the email list. So, if you join the group, I ask for your email. If you get a bundle, then you’re entering your email.

Then we have sales. As primarily a coach, my sales usually happen through emails, direct message conversations, and sales calls.

Excitement happens when I deliver and people get results.

And the last stage is referral. So, I pay referral fees. That’s one thing I try to mention every now and then. It’s to get people excited about sending people my way. You can become an affiliate too, which I don’t have many affiliates, but you could do that.

So, that’s my customer journey.

Now, another example of a customer journey, I’ll just give one, a blogger example:

• SEO is your awareness.
• Consideration is your blog post
• Your conversion is your lead magnet
• Your sales come from your email campaigns or trip wire
• Your excitement comes from the delivery
• Your referrals come from however you want to get referrals.

So, those are two examples of the journey. When you’re creating this six figure customer journey, you’re keeping in mind all these other things we’ve talked about.

NEED MORE SUPPORT?

This framework is powerful – but it’s way more powerful to have personal, one-on-one support.

If you’d like some help growing your business, let’s chat: AlisonReeves.Co/strategy-call